Comment by Zetaphor
20 hours ago
People keep repeating this without any real thought behind it because of the high profile resignations on the Qwen team. Meanwhile the Minimax team just released a new open weights version of their 229B model yesterday. So much for that narrative.
The AI landscape in China is larger than just Qwen and Alibaba.
> Meanwhile the Minimax team just released a new open weights version of their 229B model yesterday.
its under new license prohibiting any commercial use.
The statement was that China was giving up on open weights, they didn't say anything about licensing. Licensing on these models has always been hit or miss depending on which lab and which release.
but context of the statement is discussion about corps do grab and rent strategy. My understanding is that referenced Chinese model can't be argument in this context, and there is no recent 200B+ params Chinese models with friendly license.
That license is more like business source license vs open source license.
Who in the world would care about that, and why?
You know what else was under a license prohibiting commercial use? The training data.
Of course, but for how long? Do you think that companies will keep giving away valuable assets for free forever, or do you think that in the near future there's going to be an open weights model that's so good that people keep using it indefinitely instead of going back to frontier model providers?
The first one is just incredibly naive, the second might be true for some people, for some tasks, but it's not going to capture the majority who're chasing the latest and greatest to "keep up".
> Do you think that companies will keep giving away valuable assets for free forever
If China is forced to choose between giving the entire AI market to the US or releasing free models, they'll be releasing free models as long as it's necessary.
the asset's value is in being released, so yes
What does that mean?
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do you think that in the near future there's going to be an open weights model that's so good that people keep using it indefinitely instead of going back to frontier model providers?
We are almost at that point now, where the harnesses and tools are more important drivers of functionality and performance than the model weights themselves. We'll get there.